State Hermitage Exhibits “Last Surrealist”

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

State Hermitage Exhibits “Last Surrealist” State Hermitage Exhibits “Last Surrealist” The exhibition “Roberto Matta and the Fourth Dimension,” a retrospection of a major artist virtually unknown in Russia, has opened at two floors of the General Staff building. The exhibition “Roberto Matta and the Fourth Dimension,” presenting a complete review of the “last Surrealist”’s legacy, virtually unknown in Russia, has opened at two floors of the General Staff building of the State Hermitage. He earned the status of the “last Surrealist” just by surviving all the others. The colossal space-like landscapes that Roberto Matta (1911–2002) created in 1960–1990s, his early experiments with automated writing, including those he made by fingers, without a brush, his attempts to create a four- dimensional universe, combining time and volume, and the drawings of the WWII era reminding of his Surrealist past, and his livre d’artiste works – all this makes up a huge exhibition that is a real discovery to the Russian audience. Because there are no Matta’s works in Russia. His pieces were brought to St. Petersburg from the US, Great Britain, Italy, Israel, Mexico, France and Switzerland. An Artist for Artists There were no major exhibitions of Matta in the West after 1980s as well. Matta, who became a phenomenon in art history, a pillar for the American Abstract Impressionism, in the end had to share the limelight with those who followed him. In a sense, he was more of an artist for artists than an artist for the people. “If I had become trendy or if the media had followed me, I would have been doing the same thing all the time. But as no one said a word about my works, I just kept working,” said Matta in 2001 in his interview to Hans-Ulrich Obrist, a famous curator and art historian, recalling mid-1930s. But neither he could stop and reap the benefits of his further success, when his works made it to the world’s largest museums - the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’s MoMA, the Centre Pompidou. Roberto Matta’s retrospective of 1957 was the first major solo project at MoMa after its reconstruction. Matta’s first retrospective in Europe was at the city museum of Amsterdam in 1964, one more followed at the National Gallery in Berlin in 1970, then at the Centre Pompidou in 1985. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, among other things, features his “cube” – a spatial object that the artist made of his works, a kind of a total installation that one can enter to experience the cosmic space created by Matta. Given the lack of opportunity to bring the items from the US museums to Russia, the US gallerist Oksana Salamatina (a co-curator of the exhibition along with Dmitry Ozerkov, head of the contemporary arts department of the State Hermitage) gathered Matta’s works from 23 private collections and funds. The largest contribution was made by Lucid Art Foundation (California) set up by the family of Gordon Onslow Ford, Matta’s closest friend, colleague and almost his coeval. It was Matta who introduced Gordon Onslow Ford to Surrealism. It was in mid-1930s, when both of them were inspired by the ideas of Pyotr Ouspensky who spoke about expansion of visual perception in his book “Tertium Organum” (1912). Ouspensky’s ideas enhanced Matta’s creativity with that “fourth dimension” that gave the title to the exhibition and to his early works. And these ideas also pushed Matta out of the Surrealist circle. A Basque by origin and cosmopolitan by nature, Roberto Antonio Sebastian Matta Echaurren, born in Chili, risen to fame in Paris, London and New York, and died in Italy, could never lock himself within the boundaries of any art style and use the same set of tools, as well as give all his life to one woman – and many he had – and one country. Duchamp and Poor People With a degree in architecture from the Catholic University of Santiago, he found a job at a merchant ship and made it to Paris. In 1933–1934, he worked for Le Corbusier, making drafts for the latter’s “Cité Radieuse.” He also made his own sketches, showing an ever-lasting process of everything turning into anything. At some point, he made friends with Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali, and the latter introduced him to Andre Breton, the father of Surrealism. Having met Matta, Breton said as the latter had left: “The best drawings were brought in by a young man you would least expect them from.” Matta was able to participate at the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1938 at Georges Wildenstein gallery. But the young man was more impressed with Marcel Duchamp rather than Breton – he was fascinated with the former’s quest for “indefinite space” and his scientific approach to anything, including art – on top of that, Duchamp played chess and composed chess problems. For the rest of his life, Matta has been doing scientific fact-checking of his art, making his own discoveries, believing that the creation of non-Euclidian geometry was not just a scientific breakthrough but also a milestone that defined the development of art in the 20th century. And he knew well what he was worth. In the same interview that he gave Obrist one year prior to his death, Matta compared the New York school artist – Pollock, Motherwell etc. – with gleaners, describing them with this derogatory word as people who take “what's left of the rejects on the ground. After the markets, there are still broken eggs, half-opened tomatoes, things like that. There are people coming to take them, aren't there? They're doing what they can with this. Matta believed that these “gleaners” made the New York school of painting. “The New York school is a bunch of gleaners. They took what was left of the 1920s and 1930s and took it down. A little bit of Man Ray, a little bit of Maxence and they are mimicking Warhol’s style. That's how we are. Where we are now. The only thing that matters is who creates something.” There and back again Matta found himself in the US in 1939, fleeing the WWII along with many European artists. In 1948, he had to flee back from the McCarthyist America due to his Communist ideas, like many others, including Charlie Chaplin, to whom Matta always admitted to feel some kind of affinity. At the same time he was ostracized by the Surrealist for his immoral act – he had an affair with the wife of Arshile Gorky who later (but doubtfully because of that) committed suicide. Gorky had many misfortunes, including cancer and mental illness. His wife let many men seduce her but it was Matta whom Breton was never able to forgive. Matta would change his style but not his creed. The unsuccessful campaign to pardon the Rosenbergs, accused of giving the US nuclear secrets to the USSR, gave birth to his “Rosenberg Jury” (1952) and “The Murder of the Rosenbergs” (1954), the paintings that depict American justice as a killing machine. He supported the government of Salvador Allende in Chile – his colossal mural in Santiago, painted over by the Pinochet authorities, was only recently restored after the artist’s death. The death of Roberto Matta was a national tragedy for Chile, as the nation mourned him for three days, and he was declared the leading Chilean painter during his lifetime, which confused him a lot. With all his South American expressive style of painting, his art was cosmopolitan too. Seeking the sources of his creativity, it is worth looking back at Europe. The creepy humanoids of his drawings and paintings of 1940–1950s are not just reflections of his fears of war that he was lucky not to experience first-hand, but also his mind’s renditions of the monsters of Picasso’s “Guernica” that he could see at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937. “Guernica” was exhibited in Spanish Republic pavilion and Matta made sketches of that building. In 1936-1939, he worked as an architect with Gropius and Moholy-Nagy, met Alvar Aalto, wrote essays on architecture for the Surrealist magazine “Minotaur.” Architecture has always been part of his creative legacy, an element of his visual language in his later monumental works, in the early canvases of the “Psychological morphology” series, and the “Inscapes” of the 1940s where he portrayed his inner world. .
Recommended publications
  • Gordon Onslow Ford Voyager and Visionary
    Gordon Onslow Ford Voyager and Visionary 11 February – 13 May 2012 The Mint Museum 1 COVER Gordon Onslow Ford, Le Vallee, Switzerland, circa 1938 Photograph by Elisabeth Onslow Ford, courtesy of Lucid Art Foundation FIGURE 1 Sketch for Escape, October 1939 gouache on paper Photograph courtesy of Lucid Art Foundation Gordon Onslow Ford: Voyager and Visionary As a young midshipman in the British Royal Navy, Gordon Onslow Ford (1912-2003) welcomed standing the night watch on deck, where he was charged with determining the ship’s location by using a sextant to take readings from the stars. Although he left the navy, the experience of those nights at sea may well have been the starting point for the voyages he was to make in his painting over a lifetime, at first into a fabricated symbolic realm, and even- tually into the expanding spaces he created on his canvases. The trajectory of Gordon Onslow Ford’s voyages began at his birth- place in Wendover, England and led to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth and to three years at sea as a junior officer in the Mediterranean and Atlantic fleets of the British Navy. He resigned from the navy in order to study art in Paris, where he became the youngest member of the pre-war Surrealist group. At the start of World War II, he returned to England for active duty. While in London awaiting a naval assignment, he organized a Surrealist exhibition and oversaw the publication of Surrealist poetry and artworks that had been produced the previous summer in France (fig.
    [Show full text]
  • Homage to Roberto Matta
    FIAC PARIS | BOOTH C29 | GRAND PALAIS | OCTOBER 17–20, 2019 At this year’s FIAC, in honor of the late Germana Matta, we will mount an Homage to Roberto Matta Paris was one of the principal residencies of Matta. The exhibition will therefore include parts of the archives and sketchbooks from Matta’s Parisian home. The core of the presentation consists of three highly important large scale works, executed between 1947 and 1958. It will be complemented by midsize works on canvas and paper as well as sculptures. Matta’s influence can be felt both in today’s Contemporary Art as well as in the Tech-World; his impact on fellow New York artists in the 1940’s was summarized by nobody other than Marcel Duchamp: “Still a young man, Matta is the most profound painter of his generation” MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1944 While the legendary MoMA curator and Picasso Scholar William Rubin had this to say about Matta: “Matta became the only painter after Duchamp to explore wholly new possibilities in illusionistic space” WILLIAM RUBIN, 1985 For more information on our FIAC exhibition and Matta please contact Mathias Rastorfer: [email protected] Additional works to be shown are by Yves Klein, Wifredo Lam, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Antonio Saura ABOUT GALERIE GMURZYNSKA Founded in Cologne in 1965, Galerie Gmurzynska has been a leading international art gallery specializing in masterpieces of both classic modern and post-war art for more than 50 years. Galerie Gmurzynska is also the prime gallery worldwide for artists of the Russian avant-garde and early 20th century abstraction.
    [Show full text]
  • Art on the Page
    Art on the page Toward a modern illustrated book When Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard issued his first publication, Parallèlement, in 1900, a collection of poems by Paul Verlaine illustrated with lithographs by Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard, he ushered in a new form of illustrated book to mark the new century. In the following decades, he and other entrepreneurial art publishers such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Albert Skira would take advantage of a widening pool of book collectors interested in modern art by producing deluxe books that featured original prints by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, André Derain and others. These books are generally referred to as livres des artistes and, unlike the fine press publications produced by the Kelmscott Press, the Doves Press or Ashendene Press, the earliest examples were distinguished by their modernity. Breon Mitchell, in his introduction to Beyond illustration, argues that the livre d’artiste can be differentiated from the traditional book in several respects: The illustrations are, in each case, original works of art (woodcuts, lithographs, etchings, engravings) executed by the artist himself and printed under his supervision. The book thus contains original graphics of the kind which find their place on museum walls … The livre d’artiste is also defined by the stature of the artist. Virtually every major painter and sculptor of the twentieth century—Picasso, Braque, Ernst, Matisse, Kokoschka, Barlach, Miró, to name a few—has collaborated in the creation of one or more such works. In many cases, book illustration has occupied such an important place in the total oeuvre of the artist that no student of art history can safely ignore it.
    [Show full text]
  • Drawing Surrealism Didactics 10.22.12.Pdf
    ^ Drawing Surrealism Didactics Drawing Surrealism is the first-ever large-scale exhibition to explore the significance of drawing and works on paper to surrealist innovation. Although launched initially as a literary movement with the publication of André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, surrealism quickly became a cultural phenomenon in which the visual arts were central to envisioning the world of dreams and the unconscious. Automatic drawings, exquisite corpses, frottage, decalcomania, and collage are just a few of the drawing-based processes invented or reinvented by surrealists as means to tap into the subconscious realm. With surrealism, drawing, long recognized as the medium of exploration and innovation for its use in studies and preparatory sketches, was set free from its associations with other media (painting notably) and valued for its intrinsic qualities of immediacy and spontaneity. This exhibition reveals how drawing, often considered a minor medium, became a predominant mode of expression and innovation that has had long-standing repercussions in the history of art. The inclusion of drawing-based projects by contemporary artists Alexandra Grant, Mark Licari, and Stas Orlovski, conceived specifically for Drawing Surrealism , aspires to elucidate the diverse and enduring vestiges of surrealist drawing. Drawing Surrealism is also the first exhibition to examine the impact of surrealist drawing on a global scale . In addition to works from well-known surrealist artists based in France (André Masson, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, among them), drawings by lesser-known artists from Western Europe, as well as from countries in Eastern Europe and the Americas, Great Britain, and Japan, are included.
    [Show full text]
  • Works on Paper & Editions 11.03.2020
    WORKS ON PAPER & EDITIONS 11.03.2020 Loten met '*' zijn afgebeeld. Afmetingen: in mm, excl. kader. Schattingen niet vermeld indien lager dan € 100. 1. Datum van de veiling De openbare verkoping van de hierna geïnventariseerde goederen en kunstvoorwerpen zal plaatshebben op woensdag 11 maart om 10u en 14u in het Veilinghuis Bernaerts, Verlatstraat 18 te 2000 Antwerpen 2. Data van bezichtiging De liefhebbers kunnen de goederen en kunstvoorwerpen bezichtigen Verlatstraat 18 te 2000 Antwerpen op donderdag 5 maart vrijdag 6 maart zaterdag 7 maart en zondag 8 maart van 10 tot 18u Opgelet! Door een concert op zondagochtend 8 maart zal zaal Platform (1e verd.) niet toegankelijk zijn van 10-12u. 3. Data van afhaling Onmiddellijk na de veiling of op donderdag 12 maart van 9 tot 12u en van 13u30 tot 17u op vrijdag 13 maart van 9 tot 12u en van 13u30 tot 17u en ten laatste op zaterdag 14 maart van 10 tot 12u via Verlatstraat 18 4. Kosten 23 % 28 % via WebCast (registratie tot ten laatste dinsdag 10 maart, 18u) 30 % via After Sale €2/ lot administratieve kost 5. Telefonische biedingen Geen telefonische biedingen onder € 500 Veilinghuis Bernaerts/ Bernaerts Auctioneers Verlatstraat 18 2000 Antwerpen/ Antwerp T +32 (0)3 248 19 21 F +32 (0)3 248 15 93 www.bernaerts.be [email protected] Biedingen/ Biddings F +32 (0)3 248 15 93 Geen telefonische biedingen onder € 500 No telephone biddings when estimation is less than € 500 Live Webcast Registratie tot dinsdag 10 maart, 18u Identification till Tuesday 10 March, 6 pm Through Invaluable or Auction Mobility
    [Show full text]
  • Surrealism-Revolution Against Whiteness
    summer 1998 number 9 $5 TREASON TO WHITENESS IS LOYALTY TO HUMANITY Race Traitor Treason to whiteness is loyaltyto humanity NUMBER 9 f SUMMER 1998 editors: John Garvey, Beth Henson, Noel lgnatiev, Adam Sabra contributing editors: Abdul Alkalimat. John Bracey, Kingsley Clarke, Sewlyn Cudjoe, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin.James W. Fraser, Carolyn Karcher, Robin D. G. Kelley, Louis Kushnick , Kathryne V. Lindberg, Kimathi Mohammed, Theresa Perry. Eugene F. Rivers Ill, Phil Rubio, Vron Ware Race Traitor is published by The New Abolitionists, Inc. post office box 603, Cambridge MA 02140-0005. Single copies are $5 ($6 postpaid), subscriptions (four issues) are $20 individual, $40 institutions. Bulk rates available. Website: http://www. postfun. com/racetraitor. Midwest readers can contact RT at (312) 794-2954. For 1nformat1on about the contents and ava1lab1l1ty of back issues & to learn about the New Abol1t1onist Society v1s1t our web page: www.postfun.com/racetraitor PostF un is a full service web design studio offering complete web development and internet marketing. Contact us today for more information or visit our web site: www.postfun.com/services. Post Office Box 1666, Hollywood CA 90078-1666 Email: [email protected] RACE TRAITOR I SURREALIST ISSUE Guest Editor: Franklin Rosemont FEATURES The Chicago Surrealist Group: Introduction ....................................... 3 Surrealists on Whiteness, from 1925 to the Present .............................. 5 Franklin Rosemont: Surrealism-Revolution Against Whiteness ............ 19 J. Allen Fees: Burning the Days ......................................................3 0 Dave Roediger: Plotting Against Eurocentrism ....................................32 Pierre Mabille: The Marvelous-Basis of a Free Society ...................... .40 Philip Lamantia: The Days Fall Asleep with Riddles ........................... .41 The Surrealist Group of Madrid: Beyond Anti-Racism ......................
    [Show full text]
  • Cat151 Working.Qxd
    Catalogue 151 election from Ars Libri’s stock of rare books 2 L’ÂGE DU CINÉMA. Directeur: Adonis Kyrou. Rédacteur en chef: Robert Benayoun. No. 4-5, août-novembre 1951. Numéro spé cial [Cinéma surréaliste]. 63, (1)pp. Prof. illus. Oblong sm. 4to. Dec. wraps. Acetate cover. One of 50 hors commerce copies, desig nated in pen with roman numerals, from the édition de luxe of 150 in all, containing, loosely inserted, an original lithograph by Wifredo Lam, signed in pen in the margin, and 5 original strips of film (“filmomanies symptomatiques”); the issue is signed in colored inks by all 17 contributors—including Toyen, Heisler, Man Ray, Péret, Breton, and others—on the first blank leaf. Opening with a classic Surrealist list of films to be seen and films to be shunned (“Voyez,” “Voyez pas”), the issue includes articles by Adonis Kyrou (on “L’âge d’or”), J.-B. Brunius, Toyen (“Confluence”), Péret (“L’escalier aux cent marches”; “La semaine dernière,” présenté par Jindrich Heisler), Gérard Legrand, Georges Goldfayn, Man Ray (“Cinémage”), André Breton (“Comme dans un bois”), “le Groupe Surréaliste Roumain,” Nora Mitrani, Jean Schuster, Jean Ferry, and others. Apart from cinema stills, the illustrations includes work by Adrien Dax, Heisler, Man Ray, Toyen, and Clovis Trouille. The cover of the issue, printed on silver foil stock, is an arresting image from Heisler’s recent film, based on Jarry, “Le surmâle.” Covers a little rubbed. Paris, 1951. 3 (ARP) Hugnet, Georges. La sphère de sable. Illustrations de Jean Arp. (Collection “Pour Mes Amis.” II.) 23, (5)pp. 35 illustrations and ornaments by Arp (2 full-page), integrated with the text.
    [Show full text]
  • Salvador Dalí. Óscar Domínguez Surrealism and Revolution
    Salvador Dalí. Óscar Domínguez Surrealism and Revolution The publication in 1929 of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism marked a new stage in surrealism, character- ised by a move closer to revolutionary ideologies aimed at transforming not just art but society and its whole moral doctrine. Fundamental to this new stage was the innovative drive of two Spanish artists: Salvador Dalí and Óscar Domínguez. The founding of the journal Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution Dalí attempted to translate the mind’s dreamlike processes into in 1930 offers an exemplary account of the ideological premise that painting, exhibited in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Aside the surrealist movement had achieved. The year before, the second from his admiration for Freud, Dalí’s encounter with Jacques surrealist manifesto proposed its “threefold revolution in solidarity”: Lacan in 1932, shortly after the artist published his thesis on that is, an artistic and literary transformation, a moral transformation paranoia, would greatly influence his work. Soon after, Dalí would and a societal transformation. In this manner, the connections some develop his “Paranoiac-Critical Method,” which entailed an en- artists had to the Communist Party and its influence on the surrealist tire revolution for the movement. This method, which drew from movement were made explicit. surrealist techniques, distinguished itself from the others in two In its second stage, the movement needed to reinvent itself, and two main aspects: by introducing the active condition and realism figures like Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and Óscar Domínguez (1906- to the movement. On the one hand, Dalí’s method rejected the 1957) could foster this necessary change.
    [Show full text]
  • Guest Biographies Booklet
    CREDITS Game Design by Mary Flanagan & Max Seidman • Illustration by Virginia Mori • Graphic Design by Spring Yu • Writing and Logistics by Danielle Taylor • Production & Web by Sukdith Punjasthitkul • Community Management by Rachel Billings • Additional Game Design by Emma Hobday • Playtesting by Momoka Schmidt & Joshua Po Special thanks to: Andrea Fisher and the Artists Rights Society The surrealists’ families and estates Hewson Chen Our Kickstarter backers Lola Álvarez Bravo LOW-la AL-vah-rez BRAH-vo An early innovator in photography in Mexico, Lola Álvarez Bravo began her career as a teacher. She learned photography as an assistant and had her first solo exhibition in 1944 at Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts. She described the camera as a way to show “the life I found before me.” Álvarez Bravo was engaged in the Mexican surrealist movement, documenting the lives of many fellow artists in her work. Jean Arp JON ARP (J as in mirage) Jean Arp (also known as Hans Arp), was a German-French sculp- tor, painter, and writer best known for his paper cut-outs and his abstract sculptures. Arp also created many collages. He worked, like other surrealists, with chance and intuition to create art instead of using reason and logic, later becoming a member of the “Abstraction-Création” art movement. 3 André Breton ahn-DRAY bruh-TAWN A founder of surrealism, avant-garde writer and artist André Breton originally trained to be a doctor, serving in the French army’s neuropsychiatric center during World War I. He used his interests in medicine and psychology to innovate in art and literature, with a particular interest in mental illness and the unconscious.
    [Show full text]
  • Two Complementary Exhibitions, One Surreal Experience Get Ready to Have Your Conceptions of Reality Shattered
    CSFINEARTSCENTER.ORG Contact: Amanda Weston, Media Relations and Outreach Manager 719‐477‐4316; [email protected] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Two Complementary Exhibitions, One Surreal Experience Get Ready to Have Your Conceptions of Reality Shattered COLORADO SPRINGS (Oct 26, 2015) — The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (FAC) proudly presents an exhibition highlighting three extraordinary paintings by celebrated artist René Magritte, accompanied by Surrealist works of his contemporaries. Your experience will begin with a companion exhibition of works by four regional artists who have been influenced by their 20th century Surrealist predecessors. Springs Surreal, on view from Oct 24 through Feb 7, will feature works by local and regional artists Kay Williams Johnson, Lorelei Beckstrom, Chris Sedgwick and Aaron Graves. And Collections Surréaliste, on view from Nov 7 through Jan 3, will feature three paintings by René Magritte (on loan from private collections) and works on paper by other well‐known European artists Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Kay Sage, Herbert Bayer, and Roberto Matta. Surrealism developed in the years between World Wars I and II. The movement took form through painting, sculpture, photography, film, and literature, and emphasized the irrational, the fantastic, and the accidental. The first Surrealist manifesto was published in 1924, and contained this definition written by painter Andre Breton: “Surrealism, pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. He continued to articulate the movement in 1930, writing, “There is a certain point for the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease being perceived as contradictions.” There were two Surrealist schools of thought.
    [Show full text]
  • Download an Informational Brochure (PDF)
    Diego Rivera (Mexico, 1886 – 1957). Diego Rivera (Mexico, 1886 –1957). History of Cuernavaca and Morelos History of Cuernavaca and Morelos Fresco Cycle. Fresco Cycle. (detail) Sugar Plantation, Tealtenango, (detail) Emiliano Zapata, 1930-31. Morelos, 1930-31. Lithographic Reproduction. Lithographic Reproduction. 10” x 8.” c.1940s. 10” x 8.” c.1940s. Roberto Fabelo (Cuba, b. 1950). Twelve Crazy Portraits. Diego Rivera is one of the most famous Latin American artists in Hard ground etching, 2/50. 10.5” x 7.5.” 2007. Irma Palacios (Mexico, b. 1943). Incense Shades. history. Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros Etching and Aquatint, 17/100. 16” x 12.” 1995. An influential Cuban artist, Roberto Fabelo’s imagery are the three great artists of the Mexican Muralist Movement that uses humans and animals to comment on the human began in the early 1920s. In 1930-31, Rivera worked on the murals Palacios is influenced by Abstract Expressionism as condition in imaginative and fantastic settings. Elements in the Palace of Cortez, Cuernavaca , Mexico which depicted the organic forms and textures evolve on her canvases. of Expressionism and Surrealism are employed in his political and agrarian history of Cuernavaca and Morelos. Her work is classified as Lyrical Abstraction as she work while relying on fundamental drawing techniques focuses on the forms, textures, and geological realities as a foundation to question the division between fantasy of nature. and reality. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera with Monkey. Black & White Photograph. 8” x 10.” c. 1940s. Roberto Matta (Chile, 1911 – 2002). L’Eau et Mana. Color Lithograph, 144/200.
    [Show full text]
  • André Breton Was an Original Member of the Dada Group Who Went on to Start and Lead the Surrealist Movement in 1924
    QUICK VIEW: Synopsis André Breton was an original member of the Dada group who went on to start and lead the Surrealist movement in 1924. In New York, Breton and his colleagues curated Surrealist exhibitions that introduced ideas of automatism and intuitive art making to the first Abstract Expressionists. He worked in various creative media, focusing on collage and printmaking as well as authoring several books. Breton innovated ways in which text and image could be united through chance association to create new, poetic word-image combinations. His ideas about accessing the unconscious and using symbols for self- expression served as a fundamental conceptual building block for New York artists in the 1940s. Key Ideas • Breton was a major member of the Dada group and the founder of Surrealism. He was dedicated to avant-garde art-making and was known for his ability to unite disparate artists through printed matter and curatorial pursuits. • Breton drafted the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, declaring Surrealism as "pure psychic automatism," deeply affecting the methodology and origins of Abstract Expressionism. • One of Breton's fundamental beliefs was in art as an anti-war protest, which he postulated during the First World War. This notion re-gained potency during and after World War II, when the early Abstract Expressionist artists were creating works to demonstrate their outrage at the atrocities happening in Europe. DETAILED VIEW: Childhood © The Art Story Foundation – All rights Reserved For more movements, artists and ideas on Modern Art visit www.TheArtStory.org André Breton was born in a small village, although his family relocated to a Parisian suburb soon after.
    [Show full text]